May 30, 2025

A friend and I were exchanging childhood photographs, and I happened to send her one from when I was 13 years old, over 60 years ago. When I remarked dryly on the changes time has wrought, she replied, “I would recognize you immediately, especially those eyes.” And, moved, I wrote back, “It is good to be recognized.” To be recognized means that an essential part of you has not been lost, but may be found again, at least by those who care. She and I have been friends since only a few years after that photo was taken, and it is good to know that we still find each other, and are not lost so long as one is there to recognize the other.

The inverse of this is a failure to recognize, the triumph of mutability, the most tragic version of which is the failure to recognize oneself. In addition to the inevitable Picture of Dorian Gray, there is a remarkable moment in the last book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses when the poet imagines Helen of Troy in her old age:

          and Helen weeps
To see her wrinkles in the looking glass:
Could this old woman ever have been ravished,
Taken twice over? (Rolfe Humphries translation)

The same experience is repeated in James Cameron’s Titanic, when the 100-year-old woman remembers when she was a young Kate Winslet posing naked for her artist lover, though he has not survived to be recognized except in memory. Even more tragic is the failure of recognition when Alzheimer’s patients no longer know their spouses or family members. But that power of recognition is an act of the imagination raising the hope that all is not lost in time, that there is a mystery that works in the other direction.

Recognition is a primary theme in literature, thanks in part to Aristotle’s Poetics, which speaks of recognition, or anagnorisis, as it functions negatively in tragedy. But it functions positively in comedy and romance. Northrop Frye examines it in Shakespeare in an essay called “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale.” Like all four of Shakespeare’s final romances, that play takes place over a long period of time—16 years pass between Acts 2 and 3—and concerns two generations, younger and older. In the younger generation is Perdita, whose very name means “lost.” A baby in the play’s opening, she is lost, presumed dead, and is only found again at the play’s end, where she is, of course, married off to a prince once she is recognized as being of gentle blood and not a mere shepherdess. But Shakespeare’s main focus is on the older generation, in which a husband and wife, who were estranged when young, the wife disappearing and again presumed dead, are reunited. The recognition scene ought to be corny as hell: the wife pretends to be a lifelike statue on a pedestal, but then steps off of it into her grieving husband’s arms. But I have never been able to read it without tearing up.

The very word “recognition” implies a kind of knowledge, a re-cognition. The Delphic oracle’s dictum was, “Know thyself.” We must know ourselves before we can know others. But the treatment of recognition in the Poetics is in the context of tragedy, in which recognition is a destructive power, for the imagination is a power, one that can stalk someone like a demon when its shadow side is unleashed. Just ask Macbeth. In tragic and ironic literature, recognition is forced upon an unwilling subject. But, because of the crisis of our time, what has been impressing me is the refusal to know, the refusal to acknowledge the revelation of the truth that stares people in the face. Indeed, I think that the refusal to know is very close to the heart of the mystery of evil.

“Know thyself,” if taken seriously, is perhaps the ultimate challenge. We lie to ourselves as well as to others. We sometimes wonder, and especially right now, whether the liars actually believe their own lies, or whether the lies are just expedient. Modern literature, beginning in the second half of the 19^th century, has been predominantly ironic, and it is easy to wonder why. After all, previous ages were full of suffering and injustice, and our ancestors were not naive. But the idealism of which they were capable seems now difficult if not impossible, and that is a puzzle. Dictionaries will often define “irony” as a disjunction between what is said and the truth. Perhaps modernity could be characterized as an exacerbated awareness of that disjunction. For various reasons, we are skeptics about any and all truth claims. Philosophy and literary theory have been dominated by what has been called a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” hermeneutics being a would-be science of interpretation. Such a practice treats any assertion as a cover story, to be interrogated as a detective interrogates suspects in a mystery novel. Freud taught us that people have deeper motives than they admit to others, partly because they are ashamed of those motives. In fact, they have deeper motives than they admit to themselves. The ego is frequently deceived about motives that have been repressed into the unconscious. Those motives, sometimes erotic, sometimes aggressive, sometimes narcissistic, have to be uncovered by means of the clues they leave. To interpret dreams, neurotic symptoms, or the “Freudian slips” in speech is to play detective.

Which is exactly what Oedipus does in the play that gave Freud the name for the biggest lie of all. In Oedipus the King, Oedipus relentlessly pursues the identity of who has murdered the previous king, Laius, and who has brought the curse of the gods upon Thebes in the form of a plague. The moment of recognition is the devastating one in which he realizes that the malefactor he has been hunting down is himself. His self-blinding is of course symbolic: the truth is too much to recognize. The truth that Freud’s contemporaries did not want to recognize is that we are all Oedipus. Our very identity has been formed in terms of the repression of tabooed desires.

Another forefather of the hermeneutics of suspicion was Nietzsche, who said that all of philosophy is a lie. There is no will to truth: philosophers, like everyone else, are driven by the will to power. Ideas are weapons, and theories are attempts to dominate discourse, to achieve mastery: recent philosophers have spoken of “the violence of the letter.” Truth is what those who have the power to impose their view say that it is. Of course, Nietzsche puts himself in the position of the Cretan in the old philosophical conundrum who said that all Cretans are liars—so is he lying? But Nietzsche would imply that we are all Cretans, proclaiming truths that have no foundation. Contemporary philosophy speaks of “anti-foundationalism.” There is no ground under our feet, and we are in free fall. Nietzsche’s ideas about the will to power are congruent with the political theories of Marx and others. Capitalism claims that it is the only viable economic system because it is based on a realistic view of human nature as naturally competitive and acquisitive rather than cooperative and giving. But that “realistic” view of human nature is not scientific but rather a convenient rationalization of capitalist greed and selfishness. Complaints that workers are parasites who lack a work ethic and want free stuff rather than earning it are rationalizations of exploitation by an elite who have never had to work hard or go without. Likewise imperialism, whether European or American, is based on lies about racial and cultural superiority that gave white people not just the right but the duty to lord it over the “inferior” societies. World War I was such a shock, a brutal recognition scene, because it showed that Western civilization was built upon lies, lies that were in the process of crumbling.

And, to give the MAGA crowd what credit it is due, its rage is a reaction to the lies of the American elite. The Reagan revolution, driven by yuppies and other wannabes, undid much of the New Deal and, through deregulation and laissez-faire connivance, distributed income massively upward towards the billionaires and away from the lower middle and working classes. This betrayal was rationalized by fraudulent theories like trickle-down economics, hoaxes about welfare queens, and lies about “rugged individualism” promulgated by a president who played rugged individualists in cowboy movies about a West that was, in terms of historical fact, a lie. The educated-professional upper echelon of the Democratic Party went along with all this and likewise abandoned the 70% of the population who are not college-educated to a life of declining prosperity, overwork, lack of an adequate social safety net, and financial precariousness. It is now in shock because lower-class voters have had enough of their self-serving lies and excuses and have unleashed Donald Trump as their nemesis. I am one who is skeptical that there is going to be much buyer’s remorse. More likely a savage satisfaction. We have had our recognition scene, and Birnham Wood has come to Dunsinane.

A century and a half ago, art took upon itself its modern task of forcing recognition upon its reluctant audience. Hamlet is in this, as in so many things, the forerunner. He tells the players to hold the mirror up to nature—counsels them not to use their art to falsify. Confronting his mother, he uses the same metaphor, but with savage anger: “You will not go until I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you” (3.4.20-21, Bevington edition). Then he shouts at her for two pages about her corruption and treachery. Gertrude does say that Hamlet’s words correspond to things she has found within herself, yet she can be interpreted as saying that, like many people, she knows and yet chooses not to know the truth about herself. She may suspect that her lover has murdered her husband and his brother, but perhaps she carefully avoids poking into it, a low-information queen. Hamlet is the epitome of the hermeneutics of suspicion: he thinks everyone—Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, Polonius, Ophelia, Gertrude—is a hypocrite, everyone except Horatio, including himself. And this is not neurosis: he is right every time. The recognition scene of the fencing match is a series of multiple recognitions that go off like a chain of firecrackers, and that is the end of the court of Denmark. The next ruler of Denmark will be Fortinbras, who is honest in the sense that he is pure forza and too thick-headed for froda. Coleridge called Hamlet the tragedy of a man who thinks too much, and it is true that being an intellectual is no guarantee of clear-headedness. Perhaps the contrary: it is often said that intellectuals are difficult cases in therapy because they are so good at coming up with highly articulate rationalizations to avoid recognition of what their problem is.

The “problem comedy” that is virtually a companion piece to Hamlet is Measure for Measure, in which, once again, all the characters are self-hypnotized by their own lies. Isabella wants to be a nun because being sequestered is a way of hiding out from the twisted ways of the world, and particularly from men and sex. She avoids recognizing this by means of a holier-than-thou attitude. Her brother Claudio is condemned to death, postures bravely for five minutes, then turns around and begs his sister to have sex with an extortionist to save his life. Angelo, the extortionist, is a judge with a reputation for being an icicle, but inside he is a hotbed of precisely the kind of sadistic lust that Isabella is terrified of. In a quick moment’s flash of honesty, he asks himself whether he is lusting for a nun despite or because she is holy and untouchable and he wants to defile a purity that is icier than his own. At the end, Mariana still wants Angelo, who has jilted her in a particularly cruel fashion, despite his conviction as corrupt judge and would-be rapist. She is at least honest: “I want no better man.” The heart wants what it wants, as Woody Allen said—someone who unapologetically went after the 19-year-old foster daughter of his partner, and paid for it by having his career destroyed by allegations of sexual abuse for which he was investigated and declared innocent. Or is it that the legal system hypocritically covered up for him?

Attacks on bourgeois respectability became relentless in the late 19^th century, as in the new-style “problem plays” of Ibsen and Strindberg. The Decadence and the aestheticist movement of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Rimbaud, and the like exploded the conventions both of “well-made” art and a well-made respectable life. Drug abuse, sexual experimentation and promiscuity, dirt, squalor, and criminality became a means of trying to live an “authentic” life, a tradition updated for contemporary conditions by, for example, Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (1975). The protagonist of Dhalgren, known only as “Kid” or “the Kid,” runs with a gang and is sexually encyclopedic, although (like Delany) he is innocent of alcohol or drugs. He roams through a dreamlike city in which the complete breakdown of law, order, and the illusion of respectability characteristic of the inner city has encompassed the entire city—despite which, one couple, the Richardsons, keep up an insane pretense of being a cozy middle-class family out of a 60’s sitcom. Kid is an antihero, because there are no heroes. Those who pretend to be heroes are either delusional, like Conrad’s Lord Jim, or insane, like Conrad’s Kurtz. Anti-heroines live in a cocoon of stereotypical female fantasies, like Emma Bovary swooning over her romance novels or the mothers in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, who are addicted to clearly falsified memories of their girlish past.

Philosophers also become anti-heroes. Rousseau in his Confessions congratulates himself on his honesty in admitting his spanking fantasies. Nietzsche’s deliberate in-your-face obnoxiousness is intended to be refreshingly honest. In religion, Blake deliberately outrages the pious in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by unmasking their piety as mere dishonest repression. When he says, “He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence,” he knows that those most likely to be scandalized are those who harbor forbidden desires, thereby prophesying the sexual abuse epidemic among the clergy in our time. “Prophesying” is the right word: Blake called his poems Prophecies because he saw himself in the line of the Old Testament prophets who spoke truth to power, culminating in the Jesus who took mischievous delight in poking the scribes and Pharisees.

Abraham Maslow spoke of “self-esteem” as one of the basic needs, and a whole pop-psych self-esteem movement has sprung up to service that need. In Classical philosophy, particularly in Aristotle’s Ethics, pride as “greatness of soul,” or megalopsychia, is the central virtue, characteristic of the great man. It is not mere vanity but an accurate, honest judgment of one’s superiority, and the faculty by which the great man towers over and dominates the rabble. In Christian terms, this is simply pride, deadliest of sins. Its opposite is the Christian virtue of humility, born of a conviction of sin and the need for forgiveness. The Catholic Church developed the sacrament of confession, with its “examination of conscience,” precisely as a way of shattering the mirror of Narcissus and setting in its place a mirror of judgment. For those sensitive enough to take it seriously, the Catholic examination of conscience taught a discipline of self-examination and self-doubt, showing that we should always question our own motives, asking whether even the good things we have done were done out of the need to feel good about ourselves.

The problem with this discipline, as I can attest, is that there is no end to it. Motives can be endlessly doubted. Relentless self-criticism can be the most dishonest action of all, motivated by a desire to congratulate ourselves on how honest we are. But conviction of sin, even when authentic, is problematic: it can turn into a black hole of despair and a feeling of damnation, as it did with Luther. The only recourse then is to throw ourselves on the mercy of a forgiving God. Not all Christians fall into the black hole: there is a remarkable contrast between the self-abasement pervading some of Donne’s religious poems and the serene faith of George Herbert, who was influenced by him. But the conviction of sin was intended to counteract the tendency of the human race to think well of itself while acting despicably. Confession is supposed to induce a recognition scene leading to metanoia, the New Testament word translated “repentance” that literally means a turning of the mind, or, as we say, a change of heart.

But woe to those who do not repent. The most evil people seem to be those least capable of remorse. Indeed, their most salient characteristic is a kind of superiority complex. The question always arises, as it has arisen at the present time, whether such people truly believe their own grandiose conception of themselves, or whether the appearance of arrogant self-confidence is really a facade, a mask for hidden insecurity. This is asked constantly about Trump. Can he really believe the preposterous statements he makes about how great he is? Is he really that genuinely megalomaniacal? Or is it all bravado, the mask of an insecure little boy? There are many indications of Trump’s insecurity. He is absurdly thin-skinned. This week he is petulantly attacking Bruce Springsteen for saying mean things about him. And he sucks up to people like Putin, wanting their praise, because they are the type of strongman he would like to be. To compare great with small, Milton’s Satan puts on perhaps the most impressive impression of megalopsychia in literary history in the first to books of Paradise Lost. But in his soliloquy to the sun in Book 4, the mask drops and Satan admits that he is an actor. Behind the mask he is a twisted, tormented consciousness, a knot of self-hatred.

Yet that may only mean that Satan, despite the fact that he is supposed to be the epitome of evil, may be far from a worst case scenario. There are characters, in both literature and life, who give no indication that there is anything behind a mask of malice and cruelty— the mask looks exactly like their face. Iago in Othello and Goneril and Regan in King Lear, are far more chilling than Milton’s Satan because they are, so far as we can tell, utterly remorseless. without conscience. They do not even admit that their malice is wrong, much less feel remorse for it. There are also the followers of evil leaders. It is notoriously true of hard-core MAGA that they have a faith in their own delusions that genuinely religious people might envy. As Yeats said, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Just this week I was reminded by something I read of the man whose 15 minutes of fame were on his deathbed, as he swore that the Covid about to end his life did not exist. These people are possessed by the unconscious, suffering from what Jung calls inflation. But there are tens of millions of them.

For those who will not feel guilt, the Church has provided fear, the threat of hellfire eternally, hoping to scare people into repentance. Christianity is not alone in this. The Egyptian Book of the Dead also admonishes people about a final judgment after death, in which the souls of the dead are weighed on scales. But it does not work. The worst people aren’t bothered by it for a minute. Instead, it terrorizes sensitive people who take it all seriously, as it did me in adolescence. It seems as if the shield of denial and magical thinking is impregnable. I never really have revenge fantasies of the violent, road-rage kind. But I do fantasize sometimes, I confess, about having the satisfaction of God himself appearing to all those who shrug off every criticism of their heartlessness as liberal bias and fake news. Yet it is futile. If God appeared and denounced them, large numbers would say they had not heard about it and disbelieved it because it was not on Fox News. Others would say it was a fraud, that it wasn’t really God but some liberal or Jewish or Satanist plot to deceive people. Some would even declare that God had thereby disqualified himself and was no longer an authority. This is not an attempt at satire. The Christian nationalists have already done as much by rejecting the central tenet of Christianity, the compassionate love of agape, as “toxic empathy” and one of the worst sins.

I have occasionally caught students cheating. When confronted, they may react in one of three ways. Most are contrite and humiliated. They made a mistake, learned their lesson, and will never do that again. Another type will simply never admit they have done anything wrong. They acknowledge that the words from the source essay are somehow in their paper, but they absolutely didn’t cheat. They just didn’t realize how much the were borrowing. Or something. They deny the truth even in the face of hard evidence, presumably because they do not have the strength to recognize themselves.

There is, however, a third type, who look at me with a sullen anger, as if their getting caught is somehow my fault. They are sociopathic, likely to cheat again, and may well by now have jobs in the Trump administration. No recognition scene would have the slightest effect on them. These are lost souls, or are at least moving in that direction. Sometimes people are troubled reading in the account of the Exodus that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, so that with each plague he does not relent but doubles down. In this case, I think it is unfair to blame God. We have all met bureaucrats who will simply never admit that they have ever been wrong. Such people are, in a way, very powerful, because nothing we do can affect them. All we can do is try to render them powerless. But, though they may well escape punishment all their lives, and seem invulnerable, they demonstrate that there is a reality to eternal damnation. Not of the kind that would make God a sadist. But in the sense of song lyrics by Kevin Welch that have become a touchstone for me: “You can’t save everybody. / Everybody don’t want to be saved.” Even Jesus could not have healed those who want to remain blind. Such people live in a hell of their own making, and live in it by choice.

Here, the Christian tradition did go beyond the Classical in its understanding of evil. In Classical philosophy, evil is a logical error. No one would knowingly choose what does not benefit them: nevertheless, people are frequently in error about what would truly benefit them. Christianity, by contrast, insists on the irrationality of evil: “The evil that I would not, that I do,” says Paul. This seems to make human beings senseless creatures, though, just basically twisted and nothing to be done about it except transform them through grace in an equally irrational way. I do not think it is truly either-or. In The Productions of Time, following Frye’s analysis of Blake’s theory of the imagination, I traced human alienation and evil back to the subject-object division. The ego sees itself as a dot of consciousness in a vast, indifferent, often hostile reality objective to itself. This is a paranoid condition in which everything that is not-self, which includes almost everything, even sometimes the subject’s own body, the subject’s own mind, is isolated and unknown, and therefore a potential threat. The subject then responds by fight or flight, seeking to dominate or cowering in fear. But that condition, though it is accepted as “normality,” is in fact pathological. Blake interprets the Fall as a fall into what he called this “cloven fiction,” cloven like the devil’s hoof. That means that, for Blake, the Fall is epistemological rather than historical, a fall of consciousness. Evil is rational: people choose selfishness and the will to power because they are living in illusion. There is certainly an analogy to the Buddhism. But the illusion is not inevitable. The imagination is a power that connects, identifies, bridges the gap between self and world, self and others, self and God. Evil is, then, an error, one based on faulty information, so to speak, and that is a hopeful message because we can work to dispel the illusions. On the other hand, if evil is simply “motiveless malignity,” in a famous phrase of Coleridge’s, then we are trapped forever in a kind of Manichean world of irrational evil.

However, if the will refuses the imagination’s invitation to bridge the subject-object gap, what then? The gap doesn’t have to exist. We are not doomed to alienation. Nonetheless, Sauron is not going to attend therapy. The imagination is not all-powerful. We know that sometimes addicts simply have to be abandoned to the consequences of their choices until they hit, if they are lucky, rock bottom. And some people are not going to be cured by insight—for therapy, particularly depth therapy, attempts to work towards a recognition scene that would transform our life. But sometimes, it may be true that we are reduced to wishing vainly for some sort of exorcism that would drive out demons. I used to be a Unitarian Universalist, and the Universalists clung to the old dream, as old as the daring early-medieval theologian Origen, of universal salvation, even of the devil himself. I think we always have to assume that salvation is possible in any given case. We do not know how far some malicious person’s stubbornness may be a pose. Still, some people travel so far into the heart of darkness that it seems to swallow them, like Leviathan, as happened to Conrad’s Kurtz when he traveled down the river that was the body of the dragon, ending as nothing but a voice that called out two things: “The horror! The horror!” and “Exterminate all the brutes.” The former suggests a recognition scene that finally did break through Kurtz’s white-power delusions. The latter is the phase that Trump is entering into increasingly right now.

In Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, recognition or anagnorisis leads to catastrophe, which literally means “turning downward.” In other words, it leads to the tragic “fall” that is the play’s end. Most literature in modern times, however, has been not tragic but ironic. There have always been two ways of understanding recognition in storytelling. The recognition can be that of the audience or of the characters. Aristotle leans towards the latter, as in his central example of Oedipus learning to his horror that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. In Shakespeare, Othello likewise learns that he himself is the one who, in a nonsexual but very real way, has been the “unfaithful” partner in his marriage. At which point he punishes the malefactor by killing himself. But in modern ironic literature, it tends to be the audience that achieves the recognition that may be denied to the protagonist. The main characters may refuse to recognize their true character and cling to their delusions to the end. Or they may be denied recognition, despite their best efforts to achieve it. To refuse recognition is in fact a primary form of injustice. The theme of Kafka’s two great novels, The Trial and The Castle, is the refusal of recognition as the human condition. In The Trial, Josef K is accused by faceless legal officials of an unspecified crime. His efforts to exonerate himself are as frantic as they are fruitless. In The Castle, denial of recognition goes even further, as the main character is denied the recognition even of a name: he is simply “K.” K spends the entire novel trying to make contact with the officials in a castle that represents institutional power, but again to no avail.

Northrop Frye once said that Kafka’s works could be considered as a commentary on the Book of Job. Like Josef K, Job pleads his innocence, though his friends insist he must be guilty of something to be punished so severely. Job gets further than K, in that his God really does show up. But God refuses to explain himself, much less justify himself. Readers have been provided the recognition scene that is denied to Job, though it actually occurs at the beginning rather than the end of the story: Job has been tormented because God has a bet with Satan. God makes a huge speech to Job about how his ways are too infinite to be understood—but he conveniently never mentions the bet.

The Castle is often read as a satire on the labyrinthine, faceless bureaucracy that seems to be the face of modern life. This has been a theme in modern writing from Dicken’s Bleak House, about an interminable law case, to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to modern theories of power systems. Some of these theories are serious, as in the philosopher Michel Foucault, and some are paranoid conspiracy theories about the “deep state.” I think rage against a system that seems utterly indifferent to the plight of common people has motivated the ongoing attempt to destroy the federal bureaucracy, tragically wrongheaded as the attempt has been. Bureaucracies these days are maddeningly inconsistent. The relentless barrage of “tell us how we did” customer satisfaction surveys is presumably intended as a gesture of recognizing the customer—yet at the same time, you cannot contact anyone anymore. You get an automated voice, a list of options, and, if yours is not on the list, you can only hope that yelling “Customer representative” into the phone a sufficient number of times will result in the routing of your call to a human being—after a wait because “We are currently experiencing a high volume of calls.” The ghost of Kafka hovers at our shoulder in moments like this.

The refusal of recognition applies also to racial and sexual minorities. What people of color and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people are clamoring for is a recognition that has been denied them. They have been denied not only recognition of their full equality and worth but sometimes even of their very existence, at least their existence as fully human beings.

But in comedy and romance, recognition moves the other way, towards what Northrop Frye called “the recovery of identity,” which often happens in a positive recognition scene. The type we have glanced at in The Winter’s Tale, in which a girl of humble circumstances is revealed to be marriageable because it turns out she is of “gentle” birth after all goes back to the plots of the romantic Latin New Comedy of Plautus and Terence, in which the girl might have been a prostitute. For women, because part of their marriage potential lies in their looks, another type of recognition pattern is the “ugly duckling” formula common in old Hollywood movies in which a dowdy girl, at the appropriate moment, takes off her glasses, shakes down her hair, and turns out to be a dazzling beauty. For men, it is part of the myth of the hero that he is born in humble circumstances and is therefore disregarded. Examples range from David the shepherd boy to Jesus; from Parsifal, who is taken to be a complete fool but is destined to be the one who finds the Grail, to Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter. Actually, men can be ugly ducklings too. Meek, mild-mannered Clark Kent finds a now-vanished contrivance called a phone booth, enters it, and emerges as Superman.

Subtler recognitions involve inward rather than outward transformations. Another type of Renaissance comedy, the comedy of humors, involved the release of a character from a “humor” or obsessive form of behavior, or the release of the other characters from the influence of a humor character in a recognition scene involving unmasking, as in Molière’s Tartuffe, whose subtitle is “Or, The Hypocrite,” the word “hypocrite” originally meaning the mask worn by a Greek actor. The religious poser Tartuffe has to be unmasked before the credulous Orgon can be released from his neurotic pseudo-religiosity. This kind of release is a comic form of what Aristotle called catharsis in tragedy. Originally a medical term, catharsis meant a raising of emotions in order to cast them out. Humor obsessions are usually neurotic: the humor in Molière’s L’Avare, as its title indicates, is avarice. But more intense versions of the pattern may involve a recovery from outright madness. T.S. Eliot’s “Marina,” one of my favorite poems, is based on another Shakespearean romance, Pericles, in which a father again, as in The Winter’s Tale, recovers a daughter he had presumed lost. With poignant irony, the epigraph of the poem is from Seneca’s tragedy Hercules Furens, in which Hercules, driven mad by a divine curse, slaughters his entire family. In the terrible recognition scene, he awakens to see what he has done, and says, “What place is this, what land, what quarter of the globe?” But then Eliot’s poem, which is one of his dramatic monologues, opens with Pericles coming to recognize his daughter, yet at the same time to move into a whole new mental world:

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.

I am not sure how often it really occurs in life, but amnesia is a common motif in romance. Literal amnesia in romance becomes a metaphor for what depth psychology calls repression. Plato said that all knowledge lies within us, and is not discovered but remembered. Depth psychology says that the most deeply repressed and forgotten “memory” is that of our true identity. Freudian psychoanalysis is based on a tragic model, so that the recognition scene for a patient in analysis is going to be some variant of the universal tragic recognition that our deepest desires can never be fulfilled because the object of desire is inaccessible. The best we can hope for is the resigned state of what Freud called “normal neurosis.” To persist in our quest for the inaccessible object of desire could have catastrophic consequences, as Oedipus discovered. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan compared the psychoanalytic quest for knowledge to the myth of Actaeon, torn apart by his own hounds because he “accidentally” saw the goddess Diana naked.

Jungian analysis is based on a different myth, and this fundamental difference of vision is far profounder than a squabble about whether everything is or is not about sex. Sometimes Jung too seems articulating a tragic vision, as when he says that “life is a battlefield” and that we are “crucified on the cross of the opposites.” “We” even includes God, who, in Answer to Job, has a shadow of which he is unconscious, which he projects as the devil. Late in life, Jung’s tone darkened so much that he seemed to have very little hope left that humanity would survive in the long run. However, while recognition of the shadow is “excruciating,” and in a sense leads to a “catastrophe,” the catastrophe is not inevitably a destructive one.

The “turning downward” may be a descent quest into darkness and a kind of death, but there is always the possibility of a “good death,” a death to an old identity and yet the birth of a new, expanded one. Christ is the model of this death-and-rebirth myth, but Christianity has often been in the thrall of a conservative view that says that it is unique to Christ, that any active attempt to participate in our own transformation is mere pride. The sin-and-predestination-obsessed view that descends from Augustine results in Luther’s rejection of “works” and the insistence that we are saved by “faith alone,” in Calvin’s view that we are sinners at the hands of an angry God and can only sit and wait for the anything-but-guaranteed possibility that God might condescend to save at least a few of us.

But it is possible to interpret Jesus’ words as saying that God wants us to take up our palette and walk, that we could move mountains and walk on water. In the East, the imitatio Christi is taken even further: the Orthodox doctrine of deification says that we are enabled, through grace, not just to imitate God but to become him, to become what Blake called the divine humanity, in which God and man are two and yet one. Christian conversion follows this pattern: since his conversion, Paul says, he is “I, yet not I, but Christ in me.” Jung’s “process of individuation” is a quest in which the ego descends repeatedly into the unconscious, dies to its old self, but is reborn as an expanded identity, which Jung calls the Self. The symbolism of the Self makes clear that it is not just an individual identity but a universal one in which God, man, and the cosmos are an identity-in-difference. The agent that makes possible this death and rebirth, counterpart to grace in traditional Christianity, is the imagination, specifically identified as such by William Blake.

This death and rebirth pattern is the Christian version of something much older. It appears in the Classical mystery religions, from which early Christians like Paul seem to have borrowed. It appears in Gnosticism as the gnosis that the Church declared a heresy, stressing instead a blind faith and passive obedience. It appears, mysteriously and outside all institutional boundaries, in the Odyssey. And it appears there constantly. Odysseus defeats the Cyclops by putting out his one eye, blinding him. The episode was an old folk tale, but Homer recreates it as part of a thematic pattern in which the Cyclops’ blindness becomes part of the imagery. Such a blindness is an arrogant refusal of recognition. Odysseus escapes by the disguise of saying his name is “Nobody,” but then out of egotistical pride undoes himself by giving his true name, which enables the Cyclops to curse him, saying he will “lose everything.” Odysseus does lose everything, even his clothes in a hurricane, so that he is washed up naked on the island of the Phaiakians. He has lost his identity, become Nobody. He poses as a down and out old sailor, until, after winning a contest, he is dramatically recognized as the great Odysseus. When the Phaiakians take him back to Ithaca, Athena disguises the terrain in a fog so that Odysseus is home without even knowing it. She also disguises herself, but dramatically reveals herself, and becomes his hidden protector. Odysseus defeats 108 suitors with her help. The suitors are the counterpart of the Cyclops in the second half, stubbornly refusing to recognize that what they are doing is wrong and that they are going to pay for it. Odysseus dramatically reveals himself again and cuts them down. Then he comes before his wife, who is understandably leery of an impostor, and who tests him by referring to something that only the real Odysseus would know. Their son Telemachus is baffled, but Penelope tells him that, if this man is really Odysseus, she will know it: “There are secret signs we know, we two.” The entire epic is thus structured as a cumulative series of recognition scenes illustrating Frye’s idea that the primary literary and mythical plot is the loss and regaining of identity. Odysseus is called polytropos, the man of “many turnings,” which means not just that he is inventive and resourceful, but that he is a man of many identities, the hero with a thousand faces.

We may not be heroes, but the heroes are our models, Christ being one of them. Traditional societies have “rites of passage” to mark the stages of human life, including the “initiation rites” into adulthood which are often explicitly death-and-rebirth rituals. Modern society has substituted for the traditional social structure a supposedly meritocratic culture of individual achievement and self-improvement, including various “recognition ceremonies” in both the educational system and the workplace. College graduation is a mass recognition scene. Part of our attempt at self-improvement is therapy, which, as we said, aims at a psychological recognition scene.

What of love? It often seems that nothing is more delusional than romantic love. Mephistopheles predicts that Goethe’s Faust will see Helen of Troy in every skirt, and it is true that at first he fixates upon a naive, ordinary girl, ending in the terrible tragic recognition scene of Gretchen’s madness, despair, imprisonment, and death. But Blake said that if a fool persists in his folly, he will become wise, and Faust’s persistence ends in his union with Helen of Troy herself. While that too ends tragically, we learn in the final scene that the Eternal Feminine is not yet done with him. Love leads to Dante’s salvation: after regaining his Beatrice in the Garden of Eden, he is witness to the greatest recognition scene in the history of literature, the whole series of progressively unfolding revelations that is the Paradiso.

Dante’s recognition scene, however magnificent, accepts the traditional view of salvation as passive. True, Dante actively quests—but only with the greatest reluctance. He at first tries to refuse, telling Virgil “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul.” And he has to be goaded every step of the way by Virgil. In the recognition scene when Beatrice takes over from Virgil in the Garden of Eden, her first act after unveiling herself is to chew him out like a mother reprimanding a child, until he faints, almost a comic parody of death and rebirth. He is saved more or less despite himself, and in that he is, in the traditional view, like all of us.

Northrop Frye finds a counterbalance to such orthodoxy in the Gnostic Hymn of the Soul in the Acts of Thomas. It is a parable in which a child is sent to Egypt in quest of a pearl under the sea guarded by a serpent, but falls asleep and forgets not only his mission but his identity and falls asleep. His parents send a letter to him, which awakens him and restores his memory, whereupon he completes his mission. In his book on romance, The Secular Scripture, Frye observes about the Hymn:

Crucial to it is the role of the letter or message, which not only awakens him but is what draws him upward to his self-recognition. It seems that one becomes the ultimate hero of the great quest of man, not so much by virtue of what one does, as by virtue of what and how one reads. (104)

This implies a greater role for the arts than that of relentlessly “demystifying,” or, in my vocabulary decreating, all the illusions by which humanity clings to its misery, a function which is necessary and important but not sufficient. Frye continues:

In traditional romance, including Dante, the upward journey is the journey of a creature returning to its creator. In most modern writers, from Blake on, it is the creative power in man that is returning to its original awareness.....Identity and self-recognition begin when we realize that this is not an either/or question, when the great twins of divine creation and human recreation have merged into one, and we can see that the same shape is upon both. (104)

To illustrate this mysterious conjunction, we return to T.S. Eliot, the notorious expounder of “orthodoxy” and condemner of “heresy,” who would probably reject Frye’s conclusion. But in “Marina,” Eliot’s imagination, which knew better than Eliot the anxious ideologue, has Pericles say the following:

Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat. 
I made this, I have forgotten 
And remember. The rigging weak and the canvas rotten 
Between one June and another September. 
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.

The boat is the boat of the self, of his identity. And Pericles remembers when he looks upon what he has loved and lost, now mysteriously, miraculously returned to him. Ezra Pound, Eliot’s compatriot, said, “What thou lov’st well remains.” Even if it takes a lifetime, love may return, bearing a message and a pearl, and what the message will say is, “I’d recognize you anywhere.”

References

Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture. In ‘The Secular Scripture’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991. Edited by Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. Volume 18 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006. 3-124.